2022 Exhibitions
St. Jerome in the Wilderness in Milton
October 20th, 2022 – January 21st, 2023
AMANDA MARKO
Inhale Here. Exhale Now
August 11th – October 1st, 2022
The purpose of art is to make the invisible visible.
-Paul Klee
MAB is pleased to present Inhale Here. Exhale Now, by Amanda Marko. Marko’s solo exhibition is a deeply felt personal exploration of her meditation practice and the struggle to stay focused in this increasingly complicated and noisy world. Her use of oil and collage along with vigorous gestural mark-making embodies the struggle to stay focused as she adds subtracts and scrapes paint from the canvas or panel substrate: a push and pull, back and forth erasing action that mimics breathing.
BRICE BROWN
an/atomy
May 12th – July 30th, 2022
Every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.
-Walt Whitman, from "Song of Myself"
Milton Art Bank is thrilled to mark its five-year anniversary with an/atomy, a multi-media exhibition by MAB’s founder Brice Brown. On view is A Thing Attains A Life, a five-channel video with surround sound featuring dance and puppetry; Things I-IX, a series of sterling silver and foam sculptures; and Attainments I-VII, a suite of lenticular lens photographs. These works explore the temporal nature of life; the interconnectivity of all living things; and the beauty of impermanence. The action in A Thing Attains A Life moves from mainly dance to mainly puppetry as six dancers manipulate abstract cobalt-blue forms into more and more complex combinations, cycling from amoeba to animal to human. These cobalt forms can be seen as abstract shapes in space but are also references to body parts, bones, atoms, and energy itself. Each sculpture in the Thing series is comprised of one of the blue foam forms used in A Thing Attains A Life, now plated in silver. Removed from the digital world of the video, they have been materially transmuted from one state of existence to another. The Attainment photographs use the endlessly repetitive quality of lenticular lens technology to explore the fluidity of time and space and the fleeting nature of life. Produced as stop-motion animations situated in a digital space, these works reside forever between stasis and motion, in a continual state of flux.
SUSAN BALL FAEDER
Blue
January 27th – April 30th, 2022
MAB is pleased to present BLUE, an exhibition featuring mixed-media textile works by Susan Ball Faeder. On view are patchwork-quilts, fiber collages, rag weavings, Japanese sashiko-style embroideries, and works from Faeder’s 100 cloth amulets series. The title of the exhibition refers to indigo, a rich color with a distinct spirit and essence, often considered the mainstay of Japanese textiles. Cloth and culture naturally intertwine: Holding a piece of vintage indigo cloth in one’s hand can feel like a bullet train to the northern provinces of Japan, where winters are still harsh, and where not so very long ago (due to scarcity of materials and poverty) farmers and fishermen owned only one indigo-dyed cotton kimono. Such preciousness of fabric yielded an indigenous mending culture involving running stitches called sashiko. Layer upon layer of patching was lovingly stitched in place to prolong the life of a garment until the base merged with the mending. When it wore out, the tattered boro kimono was sliced into thin rag strips and woven into a new cloth, repurposed to yet another life. This mottainai or “waste nothing” spirit emerges in Faeder’s art as she respectfully honors the makers of Japanese indigo cloth by giving the small remnants one more lifetime. Whether as hand-stenciled yukata cotton, or the dyed and woven fabric that caresses a line of thread, or as a foundation to support other pieces of old cloth, Japanese indigo and the mending culture filters into each of the works on view at MAB. Faeder does not begin her works with a preset design or conceptual conceipt; instead, she trusts intuition while being attentive to line, color, balance, and content. She begins by threading a needle and reaching into her scrap basket to select a snippet of fabric to be appliquéd down or by coaxing a half-inch strip of tattered fabric through the loom’s warp with her fingers. The process, she says, is “a meditation of sorts, to be in the work is a practice of being present in the moment.”